


The Lark at Break of Day

by thomasjeffersonsmacaroni



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/F, International Baccalaureate (IB), M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 18:10:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16454870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thomasjeffersonsmacaroni/pseuds/thomasjeffersonsmacaroni
Summary: When best friends Hamlet and Horatio enter the IB program at Wittenberg High School, everything changes.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [every single ib student ever](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=every+single+ib+student+ever).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!  
> I am a senior in the IB program at my own high school. I love Hamlet and Horatio. Conclusion: write Hamlet and Horatio as IB students!  
> I will explain unfamiliar terms - and details about IB - within the text when they become relevant.  
> For those of you in IB: I'm sorry. But if I had a time machine to go back to my eighth grade self when I was applying for IB, I don't know if I would convince myself not to. On one hand, IB is suffering, but on the other, I wouldn't have traded these experiences and friendships I've gained for anything. I guess all I would have done is taught myself to manage my time more wisely LMAO  
> Anyway because, again, I am a senior in the IB program (college apps WOOT), I probably won't be updating this bad boy that much. It'll mostly just be stress relief from my life and a way to entertain myself.  
> Have fun, and thank you for reading <3

I woke up at 6 a.m. for the first time in twelve weeks.

Reluctantly, I pressed the button to turn the alarm off. I quickly made my bed, got dressed, and grabbed some yogurt for a quick breakfast. After breakfast, I brushed my teeth and sat perched on my bed, stroking the fur on my teddy bear while waiting for her namesake.

My best friend, Hamlet, got his driver’s license as soon as he turned sixteen, which was on July 14th. I was sixteen, too (February 3rd), but I had never gotten around to studying for the test, something that my GSA friends and I referred to as “gay culture.” As such, he was my ride until I got my license (and until my seventeenth birthday, when my moms promised to get me a new car). And my teddy bear’s name is Thelma; for my sixteenth birthday, Hamlet and I had gone to Build-A-Bear and gotten matching bears. I had quickly come up with Thelma as an anagram for Hamlet, but Hamlet had had to Google an anagram for my own name. Oar Thio, or Thio for short, sits on Hamlet’s bed with a cute little boat shirt that I had gotten as part of his birthday gift.

My phone buzzed, and I grabbed it and saw that Hamlet was here. I took my backpack and met him.

“Horatio! Best friend!” Hamlet said when I slid into the shotgun seat of his black Honda Odyssey.

“Hamlet Dane. Likewise.”

“I haven’t seen you in  _ forever,” _ Hamlet moaned, stretching his arms out in my direction.

“I was at your house yesterday,” I said, rolling my eyes. I still returned his hug before grabbing his phone (I had Touch ID) and opening Spotify.

Hamlet began to drive. “It’s still a long time, though. I miss my best friend.”

I looked up from the Kendrick Lamar that I was queueing up and saw him looking at me, drumming his fingers lazily on the steering wheel with fake longing in his eyes.

I sighed. “You don’t mean that.”

He did, though. Hamlet could be melodramatic, but I knew that 99% of what he was spouting was real. The other 1% consisted of the fact that Hamlet was the most heterosexual of heterosexuals, and I was, well, the GSA president.

“I  _ do,”  _ Hamlet protested. “You’re my best friend. I can’t think of a better person to survive IB with.”

The word “IB” reminded me of a fact I had been trying to forget. Although both Hamlet and I had spent two years in Wittenberg High School’s pre-IB program, today, the first day of our junior year, we would be entering wIttenBerg (pronounced by the teachers as WHY-ten-BEE-erg, pronounced by the students as groaning and eyerolls), or the full IB.

Thankfully, according to the structure of WHS, most of our classes would be “IB Prep,” which was essentially AP. We only had one full IB elective, which for both of us was IB Music.

"Ugh, don't remind me." I groaned, covering my ears and leaning forward.

Hamlet smirked. "TOK..."

"No!" I yelped.

"EE.."

"Ahhhh!"

"CAS..."

"Stop it!"

Hamlet patted my wrist. "C'mon, dude! CAS is easy!"

"Yeah, but it's time consuming. No gracias."

Hamlet placed two fingers to his head. "It's not time consuming if it's already something you enjoy."

I looked over at him. "What do you mean?"

"Well, for example, Ophelia Oshiro" - Hamlet cut himself off and smiled overdramatically - "likes bio. So if she does something with bio, that'll be CAS, and it'll also be fun."

"Why are you saying her full name? Only I can do that."

"Because she'll be screaming it one night."

"...her own name?"

I glanced out of the window and saw a car whose back window read "Just Married" and had a picture of a ball and a chain. Straight people were truly something else.

"Hey, didn't they make a movie about that?" Hamlet asked. "If it happened in that Italian peach movie you made me watch, it can happen in real life."

I whacked him upside the head. "Oh, shut up."

"Don't do that while I'm driving."

"Don't act like you're not already even more distracted while driving, man. That was-"

"Shush."

"But-"

Hamlet placed a finger to my lips. "Shhhhhhhhhhh."

I sighed and closed my mouth. That really wasn’t a fair move, even if Hamlet didn’t know it. There was nothing that could shut me up better than my best friend’s touch.

"But anyway," Hamlet continued, waving a hand in the air, "I enjoy theater. So I can do that for CAS. And you, Horatio, enjoy complaining. Perfect CAS activity."

"Pot. Kettle," I protested.

I paused.

"Actually, that isn't even a pot-kettle situation. That's a projector-whiteboard."

Hamlet laughed. "Okay, Mister Once-cried-because-his-order-got-messed-up-at-the-bookstore-coffee-shop."

"That wasn't complaining," I shot back. "That was crying in the bathroom. I really wanted that chocolate bagel, Ham. I REALLY WANTED IT!"

Hamlet laughed. "That's complaining, my friend."

I rolled my eyes.

“What’s your schedule?” Hamlet asked suddenly.

I reached into my backpack. “APUSH first period, then lit, then calc, then French, then physics, then music. What about you?”

“Same as you, only bio instead of physics.”

Of course he had it memorized. Ophelia Oshiro took bio too.

I had nothing against Ophelia. She was one of my best friends. And I would never mention it out loud, but I was pretty sure that she didn’t feel the same way about Hamlet that he felt about her. I just wished he would divert his attention to the other one of his two closest friends.

“Are you excited for music?” I asked Hamlet.

We’d both been in band since freshman year - me on trombone, him on clarinet - but IB Music would be a whole new experience.

“Yeah,” he sighed.

I didn’t have to ask him what was wrong. Hamlet was the ultimate theater nerd, and he was forever salty that we didn’t have IB Theater. He had to content himself by being the star of the school’s thespian club.

I nodded. “It’s gonna be great. This year is gonna be great. We don’t even have to worry about EEs and TOK and stuff until a lot later.”

Hamlet shook his head. “Junior year is the most important for college admissions. So we’re gonna have to work super hard. Besides, all of our classes are AP.”

I looked over and saw him frowning.

“Don’t be so emo all the time,” I said.

I leaned back and kicked my feet up on Hamlet’s dashboard. Seeing that we still had a couple of minutes before we got to school, I grabbed his phone and played Khalid’s “American Teen.”

“The ultimate teen anthem,” I said. “Listen. Be happy for once.”

It took him half a minute, but eventually, I heard him singing out loud (we both had all the words memorized). The song ended as we pulled into the student parking lot, and as we got out, he paused the music.

“Thank you, Horatio,” he said as he grabbed his backpack from the trunk. “You can always make me feel better.”

I nodded. That had always been my specialty.


	2. Chapter 2

As Hamlet and I walked through the doors into school, trying to ignore the useless chatter, I heard a voice screaming my name.

“Horatio Paine!”

I paused. There was only one person in the universe who said my name like that. Everyone at school used either my first or my last – not together – and when my moms were mad at me, they threw my middle name into the mix.

“Ophelia Oshiro!”

And there she was, long hair done up in its signature ponytail, wearing a denim dress and sneakers. She nodded at Hamlet and ran up to give me a hug.

Phe and I, we go way back. Freshman year, in fact, when I had just come out as gay, and she had just moved from Ohio with her dad and brother. She was, I think, the only girl who treated me like a gay best friend, not a Gay Best Friend.

There’s a difference, and she seemed to pick it up intuitively. She didn’t ask me for fashion advice (in freshman year, all I wore were shirts with sarcastic slogans on them and sweatpants). She didn’t try and take me to the salon to get our nails painted (neither of us were the biggest fans of nail polish: her because it always came off in an instant, and me because, well, I had just come out as gay in an American public school). And, most importantly, she didn’t try to ask me for advice about boys (I had been pining after the same one since sixth grade).

And I was the only one who didn’t call her “pretty Ophelia” or condescend to her when talking about biology or treat her like she didn’t know what she was talking about when, well, she knew what she was talking about more than probably anyone else in the entire IB program.

Freshman year was just the three of us – me, Ophelia, and Hamlet. Hamlet fit in a tiny bit better than the two of us ‘cause he was pretty, athletic, and good with people if they were nice to him, but he always sat with us at lunch and picked us during gym.

That’s what I liked about him: he stayed. It would have been so, so easy for him to join the popular kids and leave us misfits behind, but he didn’t. And so our four-year friendship stayed strong.

Ophelia and I aren’t misfits anymore, mainly because our class grew out of its sexism and homophobia and started treating us like human beings. But I’ll always remember freshman year as a pivotal time period in my young teenage life.

Ophelia pulled away from the hug and did finger guns at me, which I returned in an instant.

“How was your summer, Horatio Paine?” she asked me.

“Pretty good, Ophelia Oshiro. Super bummed that your dad didn’t let us hang out, though.”

Hamlet leaned forward. “Wait, what?”

Ophelia sighed and leaned against a column. “I wanted to take Horatio out for smoothies at that one tropical place, you know? They had those really good watermelon mojito ones that were only out for, like, a couple weeks in the summer. But my dad wouldn’t let me ‘cause he’s a bad influence. Apparently.”

Hamlet rolled his eyes. “Are all your friends bad influences to your dad?”

“Not you,” Ophelia said with a shake of her head. “You’re good.”

“What? How? Horatio is so much better than I am. If we were, like, in a drug bust, I’d probably want to go in there and bust all the drugs, while Horatio would be like” – he pitched his voice higher – “‘No, guys, go back, let’s go to the library and study for our geography exam tomorrow, guys, come on–’”

I sighed. “We’re not even taking geography.”

“My point exactly, my dear friend.” Hamlet reached over to ruffle my hair.

I patted Hamlet’s hand away, and he grinned.

“What’s with the sudden change of heart?” I asked her. “He never minded us hanging out before. He became more protective of you near the end of our sophomore year.”

Ophelia sighed. “Can we go somewhere more private to discuss this?”

I nodded, and she led us outside and away from the doors. Her brow was furrowed, and her mouth was parted open in concern. Whatever this was, it must have been bothering Ophelia for a long time.

We stopped, and she clenched her hands together like she was saving herself from drowning.

“Don’t tell anyone I told you this,” she whispered, “but he thinks Laertes is gay.”

I pressed my lips together. Ophelia’s brother, Laertes Oshiro, last time I saw him, was coming back from the gym and making sexist jokes. I had thought nothing of it at the time, but now that Ophelia brought it back to my attention, I saw my elementary school self in him, overcompensating with masculinity for looking at cute boys during class.

“Why does he think that?” Hamlet asked.

“Lae hasn’t actually shown any interest in girls.” Ophelia said, frown on her face. “And when he does, it’s, like, really fake. Like, he tells us about his crushes on the most popular girls that he doesn’t even know. And he’s never actually dated a girl since elementary school, but that doesn’t count. And–”

Ophelia motioned for us to come closer and dropped her voice even lower.

“One time, I was working on bio, and part of it was about amylase. And my phone was dead. So Lae gave me his to borrow, and I typed ‘am’ in the search bar, and the autofill filled in ‘am I gay,’ ‘am I gay quiz,’ ‘am I gay if I find guys hot,’ that kind of stuff. So I don’t know if he, like, identifies as gay or anything, but I definitely think he’s confused about who he is.”

“I can relate to that,” I sighed.

Ophelia nodded. “So Dad has been a lot more protective of us. ‘Cause you know how he is, he’s super homophobic, and he’d flip his shit if any of us brought someone home of the same gender.”

“So that’s why he won’t let you see Horatio,” Hamlet said, running a hand through his hair.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Poor Laertes,” I said. “I hope he figures stuff out soon.”

“Me too,” Ophelia sighed.

An orange leaf fell from the sky, spiraling down before landing on the sidewalk. Leaves changing color was rare for Florida, and I hoped that that was a good sign.

I pressed my lips together. “We have to get to class. What’s your schedule, Phe?”

“History, lit, calc, Spanish, bio, chem.”

“We all have history, then,” Hamlet said.

I took Hamlet and Ophelia by the crooks of their elbows. “All right, then. Let’s go.”


End file.
